My Apostrophe Apostasy

Whats Blake and Wite and Reid Alls Over?

This from Slate.

Reign of Error

The average newspaper corrects very few of its factual errors, says professor.
By Jack Shafer

The average newspaper should expand by a factor of 50 the amount of space given to corrections if Scott R. Maier's research is any guide.

Maier, an associate professor at the University of Oregon's School of Journalism and Communication, describes in a forthcoming research paper his findings that fewer than 2 percent of factually flawed articles are corrected at dailies.

Maier's study relied on data gathered from 10 metropolitan newspapers: the Boulder Daily Camera, the Charlotte Observer, the Detroit Free Press, the Grand Forks Herald, the Lexington Herald-Leader, the Miami Herald (Broward Edition), the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Jose Mercury News, the Tallahassee Democrat, and the Wichita Eagle. Starting on an arbitrary date, researchers clipped from each newspaper every locally produced and bylined story from Page One and the metro, business, and the lifestyle sections until they had collected 400. The study culled no sports stories, opinion pieces, columns, or reviews. (For reasons I won't go into here, only 200 news stories were gathered from the Free Press and 200 from the Inquirer, making for a total of 3,600 articles.)
...

The results might shock even the most jaded of newspaper readers. About 69 percent of the 3,600 news sources completed the survey, and they spotted 2,615 factual errors in 1,220 stories. That means that about half of the stories for which a survey was completed contained one or more errors. Just 23 of the flawed stories—less than 2 percent—generated newspaper corrections. No paper corrected more than 4.2 percent of its flawed articles.

Obviously, a newspaper can't publish a correction until it learns of its error. But the studied dailies performed poorly when informed of their goofs. Maier found that 130 of the news sources reported having asked for corrections, but their complaints elicited only four corrections.

Most of the errors detected were relatively minor—an incorrect title or a wrong age. But this is small consolation given the preponderance of errors documented by Maier and the alleged failure of some newspapers to run a correction, even after being asked.

I hope somebody forwards Maier's research to New York Times Public Editor Clark Hoyt, if only to calm him down. In a Sunday column about chronic misspellings in the Times, Hoyt bemoans the incredible number of names the newspaper misspells, calling them a "cancer" that "appears to be getting worse." Hoyt writes:

… The New York Times misspells names at a ferocious rate—famous names, obscure names, names of the dead in their obituaries, names of the living in their wedding announcements, household names from Hollywood, names of Cabinet officers, sports figures, the shoe bomber, the film critic for The Daily News in New York and, astonishingly and repeatedly, Sulzberger, the name of the family that owns The New York Times.

Given Maier's findings, it's more likely that the number of misspelled names the Times corrects—which Hoyt claims hit 269 for the year as of early August—reflects rigor rather than negligence at the paper.

Consider: The Times published an average of one correction a day in 1982, Maier reports in his paper, while in 2004 it averaged nine a day. So, is the Times more error-prone today, as Hoyt seems to believe with his talk about a worsening cancer, or does its aggressive solicitation of corrections via e-mail and a toll-free phone number merely boost the number of errors reported? Guess where I stand.

Hoyt also writes of the outrage the Detroit Free Press editor who hired him in 1968 would have expressed at the Times' many spelling errors. Hoyt's implication is that the Free Press, long owned by the Knight Ridder chain where Hoyt spent most of his career, enforces—or once enforced—higher standards than the Times. Is that the case?

Oh, hell no. At least eight of the newspapers shamed in Maier's study belonged to Knight Ridder at the time of the survey. So much for his former employer's devotion to accuracy.
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Two things.

First, in my meatlife I’m actually a fairly good editor, but owing to some freak of brain chemistry, I am helplessly prose-lexic when it comes to my own words. The steam engine up top gets waaay out ahead of my fingers, which then go on strike and start rat-a-tatting things out phonetically, or as they should be spelled in a sane universe, or just wrong.

Now if I let the page cool for several days, my brain mysteriously stops looking at my own words on the page as “Mah baby! Don’t touch mah baby!” and lets my inner editor out to carve into it like Sunday pot roast.

(Do people still have Sunday pot roasts, I wonder?)

It is the only med’cine I have found that works, but “waiting several days” and “blogging crazyfast on horseback between gigs” do not seem to be realities that I can ever force to live harmoniously under one roof.

So there’s that.

But second, Big Media ain’t some lone blogger pecking away at a keyboard while trying to gobble down a sammich and cup of coffee in the interstices between rent-paying labors. So if you are looking for a slam-dunk-easy master’s thesis, how about mapping out the virtual absence of errors of any kind in high-end newspaper advertisements against the raft of errors everywhere else in the same publication?

And the reason for this glaring imbalance?

Money, baby.

Right down the line from Philip Morris, to Lexus to Dell, big (and even small- to medium-sized) companies spend more per-word on lawyers, copy-editors and proofreaders than Mitt Romney spent per-vote in the meaningless Iowa Straw Poll.

Because when “product” in on the line, no expense is spared the make sure every “i” is literally dotted, and every “t” crossed.

Now invert the money-to-accuracy relationship and note what it tells you about the MSM: That since the world of advertising proves it is indeed possible to buy grammatical exactitude by the job-lot, the fact that newspapers choose not to do so comes down to nothing more complicated than another example of the fiscal priorities of Big Media.

In other words, money talks…and spells.

And bullshit walks.

And for every rock-star-salaried Bobo or Friedman or Broder the MSM chooses to buy with their limited resources, that’s a small army of solid, professional writers and copy-editors they could have hired to get the nuts and bolts of good journalism right.

But didn’t.